Is your job composed of data analysis? Are you in charge of mapping or testing a healthcare enterprise data warehouse (EDW) implementation? Are you working with programs on Oracle, DB2, Google BigQuery or Db2 Warehouse on Cloud? Why? Employees can often get accustomed to the daily routine and lose sight of the big picture.
Organizations are continuously integrating data from electronic medical records (EMR), pharmacy reports and numerous other systems. From this process, we become far removed from the real benefactors of our work. These benefactors include clinicians, researchers and most importantly, the patients. In other words, we can sometimes forget why we are putting in this effort to provide value.
Of the countless reasons for integrating healthcare data, here are three that show the real-world benefits of compiling data in an EDW.
Research
At one client’s site, we developed interfaces between our IBM UDMH Warehouse and a research system using REDCap sitting on top of a MySQL data base. Researchers were then able to use the data to determine what cancer treatments worked best based on patient conditions. These data-driven treatments were developed and implemented thanks to the wealth of EMR and other data collected in the EDW.
Patient Safety
There are many success stories of using EDW data to improve patient safety. One is tracking patients with multi-drug-resistant pathogens. For example, if a patient possesses a history of multi-drug-resistant pathogen exposure and checks into a hospital; the infection control is notified immediately, and steps can be taken to prevent the spread of the pathogen. Having that information available throughout the given healthcare system and across disparate systems will help to drastically reduce the spread of those pathogens to other patients.
Reporting Optimization
All healthcare systems provide reports and information to various government entities. Gathering the data to provide that government-mandated information can be extremely time-consuming and expensive. The EDW helps data administrators to obtain, organize, and analyze the massive amounts of data throughout the system. Furthermore, freeing up healthcare resources to do what they do best, provide patient care.
Technologies continuously develop to assist in workflow efficiency. These technologies have a great and measurable impact on the success of a business. So when you are working feverishly on implementing that first or updated enterprise data warehouse, remember that it will help improve patient care and save lives.
Enterprises can really benefit from using data warehouses because they let these companies integrate and optimize information from multiple data sources into a “single version of the truth” that business users can easily leverage for the specific purpose of analysis and reporting. Users can then view the data and make decisions based on any trends they see or any insights that have been formed.